Chapter 1 - Page 2

clergyman, was, says his
grandson, "a man of great ability," and his "excellent library" was
an element in the education of his family. "My father was a poet,"
Tennyson said, "and could write regular verse very skilfully." In
physical type the sons were tall, strong, and unusually dark:
Tennyson, when abroad, was not taken for an Englishman; at home,
strangers thought him "foreign." Most of the children had the
temperament, and several of the sons had some of the accomplishments,
of genius: whence derived by way of heredity is a question beyond
conjecture, for the father's accomplishment was not unusual. As
Walton says of the poet and the angler, they "were born to be so":
we know no more.

The region in which the paternal hamlet of Somersby lies, "a land of
quiet villages, large fields, grey hillsides, and noble tall-towered
churches, on the lower slope of a Lincolnshire wold," does not appear
to have been rich in romantic legend and tradition. The folk-lore of
Lincolnshire, of which examples have been published, does seem to
have a peculiar poetry of its own, but it was rather the humorous
than the poetical aspect of the country-people that Tennyson appears
to have known. In brief, we have nothing to inform us as to how
genius came into that generation of Tennysons which was born between
1807 and 1819. A source and a cause there must have been, but these
things are hidden, except from popular science.

Precocity is not a sign of genius, but genius is perhaps always
accompanied by precocity. This is especially notable in the cases of
painting, music, and mathematics; but in the matter of literature
genius may chiefly show itself in acquisition, as in Sir Walter
Scott, who when a boy knew much, but did little that would attract
notice. As a child and a boy young Tennyson was remarked both for
acquisition and performance. His own reminiscences of his childhood
varied somewhat in detail. In one place we learn that at the age of
eight he covered a slate with blank verse in the manner of Jamie
Thomson, the only poet with whom he was then acquainted. In another
passage he says, "The first poetry that moved me was my own at five
years old. When I was eight I remember making a line I thought
grander than Campbell, or Byron, or Scott. I rolled it out, it was
this -

'With slaughterous sons of thunder rolled the flood' -

great nonsense, of course, but I thought it fine!"

It WAS fine, and was thoroughly Tennysonian. Scott, Campbell, and
Byron probably never produced a line with the qualities of this
nonsense verse. "Before I could read I was in the habit on a stormy
day of spreading my arms to the wind and crying out, 'I hear a voice
that's speaking in the wind,' and the words 'far, far